


for the record, this can still go my way

by akisazame



Category: Crazy Ex-Girlfriend (TV)
Genre: F/M, Morning After, Post-Canon, Serious Discussions, marvel as these idiots talk to each other for once in their lives
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-05
Updated: 2020-04-05
Packaged: 2021-03-01 00:42:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,175
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23486251
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/akisazame/pseuds/akisazame
Summary: "Oh god," she whispers. "Oh no.""That," Nathaniel says, voice thick with sleep, "is not an encouraging set of words to wake up to."(on February 15th 2020, Rebecca wakes up with Nathaniel in her bed.)
Relationships: Rebecca Bunch/Nathaniel Plimpton
Comments: 11
Kudos: 74





	for the record, this can still go my way

**Author's Note:**

> so there's this great podcast musical called 36 Questions, and the "title track" so to speak is For The Record, which is a true cxgf-style irrepressible earworm that I've barely been able to remove from my brain for the last couple of months. in March [anthropologicalhands](https://archiveofourown.org/users/anthropologicalhands) wrote [a fic](https://archiveofourown.org/works/15555870/chapters/55137454) that started with Rebecca saying "Just for the record," and every time I see that phrase it sets the earworm off again at full volume in my my head and then I thought, "what would a fic with this title be about?" what I'm trying to explain here is that this fic started with a title instead of an idea and then I free-associated for a while and it absolutely got away from me but honestly? I'm just happy it exists.
> 
> as mentioned, title from For The Record from 36 Questions, performed by Jonathan Groff and Jessie Shelton, though that really has nothing to do with anything at all. big thank you to [pictureofsoph1sticatedgrace](https://archiveofourown.org/users/pictureofsoph1sticatedgrace) for reading this over to make sure I didn't irrevocably goof up.

Rebecca wakes up, and she's _warm_ , and isn't that nice.

Until she realizes why she's warm, and she sits bolt upright in bed, feeling a horrified expression blossom across her face.

"Oh god," she whispers. "Oh no."

"That," Nathaniel says, voice thick with sleep, "is not an encouraging set of words to wake up to."

Rebecca shuffles out of bed and practically leaps across the room and— yep, she's naked. Obviously. Why wouldn't she be? She casts around for a robe or a towel or a blanket or _literally anything_ but all she can find is her red dress from last night, which she holds up against herself like she's a paper doll. _God._

"This shouldn't have happened," she tells him.

She should've expected it, after everything, but somehow she's still not prepared for the way his face falls for a moment before he carefully schools his expression back in order. "Right," he says, thin, before rolling over, away, sitting up, putting his feet on the floor.

"No, wait," she blurts out, not even thinking before speaking, and what's _that_ about? He stops, though, bare back to her, head slightly bowed, and she just.

Breathes.

Okay.

"I think," she says, her pulse loud between her ears, "we should talk."

Nathaniel turns just slightly to look at her, face over his broad shoulder. She can't read anything on his expression. "Oh. That's..."

She can't help the corner of her mouth turning up. "New for us? Yeah, I know. I've gotten very experimental in the past year."

"Daring," he agrees, her hesitant smile mirroring onto his features. _I'm in awe of you,_ she thinks, her words from last night echoing in her head. She wants him to feel the same way about her, wants to present herself as a person who makes good choices for good reasons, a person who's _reformed_ , but now...

It just feels too much like a backslide.

But wait. That's not good enough.

"This just feels too much like a backslide," she tells him. Using her words, for once.

He just watches her face for a moment, like he's considering her. Like he's trying to relax his eyes and make sense of her, like she's a magic eye puzzle. Then his eyes flicker down to the dress she's still holding up in front of herself, like she has any business being modest in front of him. "This feels like a conversation that needs to be had either sitting down or with clothes on."

She laughs, feeling ridiculous. "Maybe both," she says, turning and digging her bathrobe out of the hamper and putting it on before coming back to the bed. She pauses before sitting on the edge. Healthy distance.

"Should I get dressed too?" It's light, teasing, but she knows he means it. He just wants to make her comfortable, because she's clearly not comfortable at all, and that's.

Well, it's a lot.

She has to set all that aside. Putting feelings first has never worked out for her, including now. "So, in retrospect, it seems like a lot of what you and I went through as like, uh, a couple—" Why is she _blushing_ , this is _ludicrous_ , they were just naked together five minutes ago for god's sake. "It seems like some of my behavior could've been clarified by like, actually explaining my disorder to you."

His mouth goes slantwise, colon-backslash, and she can practically see exactly what he wants to say like a marquee through his eyes. _You shouldn't have to explain yourself to me,_ the marquee reads, bright green and intermittently flashing, and she doesn't want to think about how much she would've loved hearing that over a year ago, or how little she wants to hear it now.

So she leans over and puts her finger to his lips but doesn't leave it there, because she doesn't want to give him the wrong impression about what this is. "I'm not going to give you a bullet point list of the criteria for BPD or anything, because hearing all that shit listed out is like, top ten awful memory in a whole lifetime of really awful memories. But what you should know is that one of them is impulsive behavior." She stops, looks at him, lets her words sink in. Watches as he processes what she's getting at before clarifying. "This was impulsive," she says, motioning between them. "We both wanted it, and I want to make it super clear that it was like, so _so_ good in the moment but maybe in context you can see how realizing that I almost immediately jumped your bones after not seeing you for nearly twelve months is _maybe_ a little troubling in the cold light of morning."

He doesn't say anything at first, which she thinks is a bad sign until he raises an eyebrow and she realizes that he still thinks he's not allowed to speak, which is both very sweet and very heady in a way she doesn't feel is entirely appropriate for the situation. So she presses her fingertips to her thumb and then spreads her hand like a mouth opening, and he lets out a breath and wets his lips before saying, "Should you call your therapist?"

Which is. Not even on the long list of things she expected him to say.

"Oh," she says, a nonsense syllable, a stalling tactic while she reconfigures her understanding of this person who, she's just now realizing, has _also_ spent the past year learning and changing and growing. "That's. That's very, uh. Where did you learn that?"

He's kept his eyes on her this whole time but now, for just a moment, he breaks away, glancing down at the sheets before making contact again. His whole face is wide, wide open in a way she can't quite comprehend. "From mine."

She feels dizzy, breathless. When she speaks, there's an edge to it, like she's on the verge of laughing or screaming. "When the hell did you—"

"I know, I'm surprised too," he tells her, wry, and the laughter finally tumbles out of her, remembering the last time he said those words to her. She sees movement out of the corner of her eye and when she looks she sees it's his hand, fidgeting against the crumple of her sheets. She wants to grab it, hold it, feed him courage through osmosis, but she keeps both of her hands right where they are. Healthy distance, still, for now. "If I'm being honest, it was Josh's fault."

She can't help it: Rebecca snorts in disbelief. " _Josh Chan_ got _you_ into therapy."

"Not like you're thinking," he quickly returns, though he's smiling a little when he says it, an acknowledgement that the straightforward reading of his statement _would_ be pretty funny. But then the smile drops away and he runs his teeth over his bottom lip, rueful. "This story _really_ does not put me in the best light, but. Well." He looks at the ceiling to let out a long breath, but this time his gaze doesn't come back to her, instead settling on his own fidgeting hand.

Something curls in Rebecca's stomach and she tries desperately to ignore it. "Hey, you don't—"

"My father brought me up to believe that going to a doctor was a last resort," Nathaniel blurts out, pushing past her retort. Still not looking at her. "If you go to a doctor, there's something wrong with you that absolutely nothing else can fix. Something _identifiable,_ like a broken leg or a gaping wound, something that's visible from the outside. And I promise this doesn't mean the way I'm going to make it sound, but you—" His eyes flicker to her face for the briefest moment before looking away again. "You made me realize that sometimes the mental stuff is visible from the outside."

The thing in her stomach curls tighter.

"So it was fine for _you,_ " he goes on, the second-person pronoun tinged with vitriol but not in a way that seems outwardly directed, "because that was your last resort. You had something identifiably wrong with you. You'd—" He cuts himself off, shaky, and she knows instinctively what he'd been about to say. "You had a diagnosis," he says instead, because that's safer. It's always safer, but especially with him, for reasons he's never explained to her. "So that was fine. I could understand that. Which is why, after you got back together with Greg and I had a whole private crisis about it, I decided the best thing I could do for myself was buy a bunch of self-help books. And they did help, I thought. I felt, I don't know, more centered in myself. _Enlightened._ " His emphasis isn't all the way to verbal air quotes, but somewhere on the road to it, the type of acknowledgement she knows from experience that one can only make in hindsight. "And then the dates happened, and you rejected me again, and I put on a brave face in the moment but afterwards I really..." Another pause, another shaky breath, and then he's looking at her again but obviously embarrassed about it. "I mean. I left, right?"

Something slots into place in Rebecca's mind, puzzle pieces connecting even though she'd thought, all this time, that they went to two entirely separate puzzles.

"It wasn't only because of you," Nathaniel says, answering the thought she wasn't going to voice. "I mean, yeah, I was pretty devastated. But, you know, those damn self-help books, they made me think that striking out on my own was the right play." He runs a hand through the crest of his hair and laughs softly. "This wasn't the point of the story."

"Josh Chan got you into therapy," she prompts. She feels it again, the impulse to touch him, and clamps down on it as hard as she can.

"Right," he says, smiling with his mouth but not his eyes. "I don't know if you know this, but there was a brief period where Josh Chan and I were sort of something like friends."

She narrows her eyes at him, disbelieving. "When exactly did _that_ happen?"

"Around the same time as the, uh, you and Greg thing." They both glance away at the same time, awkward like teenagers, and then laugh about it, because how foolish are they to think that Rebecca's well-documented sexual and romantic history is somehow the most damning part of this conversation? "Anyway, I don't remember when or how it came up that he was in therapy. I just remember thinking, 'But there's nothing _wrong_ with you.'" Nathaniel winces outwardly, and Rebecca hopes she only winces inwardly. "At least I'd gotten far enough in those self-help books to know better than to say it out loud. But even then, it never occurred to me to apply it to myself until I was in Guatemala, and _that_ only happened after Cristina — one of the monkey handlers — threw her hands in the air and told me that she isn't a fucking therapist." He grins at her, a signal that it's okay to laugh, which she does. "It sounded even meaner in Spanish."

"I bet," Rebecca laughs, thinking of all the times Valencia has ever swapped to Spanish just to make her irritation sound extra vitriolic. "So," she says, and she simply can't contain it anymore: she leans over towards him to bump their shoulders together companionably. "You have a therapist."

"In Los Angeles, actually," he amends, once again answering a question she'd thought but wasn't going to ask. "Figured it'd be more practical, since I'd be back here eventually. Sessions over Skype, or email or text when scheduling didn't work out. I've done a lot of childhood unpacking since the last time you saw me."

She makes a face, and he chuckles, companionable commiseration. Now that he's told her about it, she can reevaluate her perception of him, reframing the entirety of their interactions since he arrived at the open mic venue under the new banner of This Is A Person Who Has Been Working On Himself.

It's... nice, to know that. Nicer, somehow, still, to know that it wasn't entirely because of her.

"Hey," Nathaniel says, bumping her shoulder again. "That got really off-track. Do you need to call your therapist?"

Two years ago, fresh off her new diagnosis and still raw from it, she would've instantly said no. One year ago, newly medicated, she would've instantly said yes. Now, with Nathaniel watching her carefully but not unkindly, she takes a moment to think about it.

And after she takes a moment to think about it, Rebecca asks Nathaniel, "Can we try to work through it together first?"

She carefully, not impulsively at all, settles the palm of her hand over the back of Nathaniel's, where it still rests on top of her sheets, and he, with the same slowness that speaks of carefully considered intent, turns his hand under hers and links their fingers together.

"Yeah," he tells her. "We can do that."


End file.
